This year I decided to start using blogs with my classes. After thinking about which software to choose, I decided to use bloxio.us which is a Wordpress MU blogging software. I decided each student would have his/her own blog and there would be a classblog as well.
I have two German classes. In one class the students are about 16 years old and have just started learning German. These students seem to have accepted the use of the blog for language learning. They don't use it very often and vey few use it spontaneously but at least they are using it when I tell them what they should post.
The second class is learning German for the third year and this will be their last year at school before they go to university or choose a job to start working. Some of these students have rejected the blog almost from the beginning and till today I haven't understood why. I find myself thinking about what might have been the reasons for this and sometimes I think that it could have been my fault.In the beginning I was very excited about the idea, maybe too excited. Or maybe because we once spent a whole lesson just setting up the students' blogs. Or because they found Wordpress and particularly this blog too complicated to use and got demotivated. Another reason could be that this blog was and still is in beta testing and this also caused a few problems, especially in the beginning. I remember that this blog works very well with Firefox but less well with Internet Explorer. And at school we only have IE installed on the computers in the computer labs. Well, there may have been quite a few reasons for this but I'll never be sure which ones were more important.
In the beginning I was very enthusiastic about the idea of using blogs with the students and thought they would appreciate the fact that they could use the Internet to improve their language skills. After a few weeks I realized that it was not like I had expected, in spite of the fact that there were a few students who reacted well and and felt motivated with the idea. However, the majority of them seemed to look at the blog as being more work, something they weren't familiar with and consequently would represent spending time to learn. It seemed to me that many students felt overhelmed by the technology they were suddenly asked to use.
Finally, as an unexperienced teacher using blogs and technology in the classroom, I admit that I must have made a lot of mistakes and missed the correct strategies to motivate the students. The good point in all this is that I learned from this experience and hope things will work out better next time.
Writingmatrix project
This is my first post on my new blog that has just been created to join the Writingmatrix project.
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